I pointed to the total on each thin, wrinkled piece of paper.
“Do you see these numbers?”
Connor and Simon knelt in their chairs and leaned in for a closer look.
“Connor’s birthday gift cost fifteen dollars and thirty-two cents,” I said. “Simon’s birthday gift, including tax, cost fifteen dollars and thirty-four cents.”
The boys looked up at me, seeming confused about what to make of the numbers.
“I want you to see that, although your gifts are different, your father and I spent the same on each of you for your birthdays. Neither gift was more expensive than the other.”
That was good enough for Connor. “Okay!” he said, sliding off his chair. “Can I go watch TV now, Mommy?”
“Yes, you may,” I said.
Having made my point, I went back to the sink, picked up the gray sponge, and dipped my hands into the dishwater, which was now lukewarm. It was another minute or so before I saw that Simon was still at the table, staring at the receipts.
“What’s the matter, honey?” I asked.
Simon glanced in my direction without meeting my eye.
I dried my hands on the towel hanging over the oven-door handle and sat next to Simon, leaning forward until my head was on the same level as his. “Tell me.”
With his eyes still on the receipts, Simon licked his lips. “W— w— w— we’re n— not th— the same.”
“Who isn’t the same?”
“M— me and Connor.”
I tilted my head and smiled. “Honey,” I said over a laugh, “everyone is different from everyone else. And the ways that you and Connor are different don’t matter to me.”
It was this afterthought of a phrase—“to me”—that betrayed the truth about the differences between Simon and Connor, a truth that Simon seemed to confirm for himself as he stared right through me. The ways in which Simon and Connor were different would matter very much. They mattered already. And my attempt to minimize the truth had only proven to Simon that his mother’s love—impartial though it was—had no power to change it.
•••
Through it all, I tried to show Simon that he was loveable, even with his stutter. Part of the way I showed this was by trying to love Simon’s father.
Frank responded by refusing the little courtesies I paid him in front of Simon, from the cream I offered to pour in his coffee to the kisses I tried to plant on his cheek before he left for work. And when he and I were alone, he ignored me. In short, Frank proved to me that his gut feeling had been right all along: he didn’t deserve my love. Even so, I kept trying to love Frank. I refused to let Simon believe that inheriting his father’s stutter meant that Simon, too, was unworthy of love and incapable of loving as he should.
I might have been able to do without Frank’s love if he’d loved Simon as well as I wanted him to. But their shared stutter came between them. Frank saw too much of himself in Simon. When he stuttered, Simon could not help but hold up a mirror to his father. Because he had never really liked himself, Frank could not love Simon enough. He couldn’t even see Simon’s boyish adoration for the blessing it was.
Frank courted Connor’s love in a way he had never courted mine. Connor was still four when I first understood how Frank saw him: as his belated chance to win over the fast-talking boys who’d teased Frank when we were at Leyton Elementary and Leyton High, boys who were now the kings and court jesters of the union hall and the bar in town and the break room at the Caterpillar plant. While I plotted to find speech therapy for Simon, Frank refashioned himself from a quiet, hard-working loner into a sitcom stereotype. He made a throne of his easy chair and sat Connor alongside him, drinking beer and barking his disapproval at the televised mistakes of men who were ten times the ballplayer he’d ever been. Frank made himself worthy of Connor’s love, in his own mind, by ensuring that the man Connor loved was hardly recognizable, to himself or anyone else, as the Frank we knew. As his father transformed before his eyes, Simon was made to feel his love was not enough. And because I had known Frank as the wounded, vulnerable stutterer he was, my love was discounted even as it died.
•••
THE OCTOBER AFTER he turned seven, Simon went completely silent.
At first, I thought he might still have been recovering from a sore throat that had kept him out of school the past Friday. By Wednesday of the following week, I supposed that Simon was just tired of hearing his stuttered sentences finished by his little brother. But Wednesday night, at dinner, I noticed Simon staring across our Formica table at his father with wet, wide-open eyes. His food was untouched, but the muscles of Simon’s jaw were flexed in front of his ears. Frank fixed his eyes on his plate, which he guarded with his elbows as if someone might try to stab his half-eaten slice of meatloaf and run off with it. While asking Connor various questions about his day at school, I glanced at Frank several more times. He never met Simon’s glare.
I knew then that something had happened between Simon and his father, but I didn’t know what, and I didn’t believe that asking either Frank or Simon about it would do anyone any good. So I waited and listened. And Simon stayed silent.
On Thursday, I got a call from Simon’s teacher, Ms. Wells.
“I’m sorry to bother you at work,” she said, without sounding the least bit sorry.
Speaking to Ms. Wells, who was probably ten years older than me, I had to fight the feeling that I was seven again and speaking to my own teacher.
“Oh, not at all,” I said. “Is anything wrong?”
“I’m calling about Simon,” Ms. Wells said. “He hasn’t been speaking all week.”
“Well,” I said, sighing, “I appreciate you telling me. Simon hasn’t said a word at home, either.”
“He hasn’t,” she said.
“No.”
“Is he ill?”
“I don’t think so, no.”
“Well, Mrs. Davies, as you surely know, dealing with Simon’s stutter requires patience from me and his classmates, and my patience is running out. This silence amounts to insubordination. It is disrupting my classroom.”
My mouth hung open until I felt the heat rising in my face. “I’m sure this has been very hard for you.”
“It has, yes,” Ms. Wells said. “And I’m concerned for Simon, of course.”
“Oh, your concern for Simon is coming through loud and clear.”
“Well,” she said, clipping the word. “I’ve said what I called to say.”
“All right, then.”
I wallowed in my irritation with that silly, self-important witch for the rest of the afternoon. By the time I arrived home, though, I worried only for Simon.
We sat down, the four of us, to a dinner of fish sticks and mashed potatoes. While Connor jabbered away about his playground adventures, Simon baited Frank with his eyes, and Frank ignored the baiting, looking only at Connor.
When the boys had gone to bed, I walked over to the television and turned the volume all the way down.
Reclining in his chair, the balls of his feet aimed up at me, Frank said, “W— w— w— what i— is it?”
His four attempts at “what” reminded me that Frank was smashed—his stutter got worse when he drank—but I couldn’t wait for him to sober up.
“Simon isn’t speaking,”